Soft law and multilevel cooperation as sources of (new) constitutional challenges in EU economic and monetary integration: Introduction to the special issue

Following the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis, numerous reforms were conducted in all areas of the European Union (EU)'s Economic and Monetary Union. These reforms aimed at strengthening the resilience of Member States' economies after they had been put under severe strain by the crisis. They included, among others, the reinforcement of the efforts toward economic coordination in the framework of the European Semester for economic policy coordination, or the creation of the European Banking Union after which competences in the areas of banking supervision and bank resolution have been transferred to the European level. More than a decade after the Great Financial Crisis however, several of these reforms are still underway. This article is an introduction to this Special Issue whose contributions examine the reforms performed to date, as well as those that are currently under discussion, from the perspectives of multilevel (administrative) cooperation and the resort to soft law instruments. Indeed, the procedures newly devised rely heavily on the effective cooperation between national and European institutions as well as on a variety of soft law instruments.